¿Qué opinan? Firmas del día: 2/8/2013

Each day we will bring you an assortment of op-ed pieces from major Mexican dailies.

Reforma

Andrés Oppenheimer

Republican congressmen have not learned their lesson. Some want to create a subclass of 11 million people, most of them Hispanic, by denying them a path to citizenship. While the details of a comprehensive immigration reform are still being worked out, three competing ideas have emerged. Some Republicans, like Rep. Robert Goodlatte from Virginia support a reform that would grant undocumented immigrants temporary legal status, without putting them on a path towards citizenship. Others, like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) support putting immigrants on a path to citizenship “eventually,” but only after increasing border security and once immigrants meet a long list of requirements. Finally, President Obama and most Democratic congressmen advocate for a direct path to citizenship as long as candidates pay a fine, learn English, and wait in line behind those who have begun the process to migrate legally. Creating a large subclass of residents would institutionalize labor abuse and other injustices. The United States should learn from France’s example, where failure to integrate millions of Muslim immigrants has led to violent riots in the past.

http://www.reforma.com/editoriales/internacional/688/1375747/

Hand of U.S. Is Seen in Halting General’s Rise in Mexico

The New York Times, 2/4/2013

As Mexico’s military staged its annual Independence Day parade in September, spectators filled the main square of Mexico City to cheer on the armed forces. Nearly 2,000 miles away in Washington, American officials were also paying attention. But it was not the helicopters hovering overhead or the antiaircraft weapons or the soldiers in camouflage that caught their attention. It was the man chosen to march at the head of the parade, Gen. Moisés García Ochoa, who by tradition typically becomes the country’s next minister of defense.

The Obama administration had many concerns about the general, including the Drug Enforcement Administration’s suspicion that he had links to drug traffickers and the Pentagon’s anxiety that he had misused military supplies and skimmed money from multimillion-dollar defense contracts. In the days leading up to Mexico’s presidential inauguration on Dec. 1, the United States ambassador to Mexico, Anthony Wayne, met with senior aides to President Enrique Peña Nieto to express alarm at the general’s possible promotion.

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